Quotes About Judaism

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.

This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.

Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.

To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.

God does not reveal Himself; he only reveals His way. Judaism does not speak of God's self-revelation, but of the revelation of His teaching for man. The Bible reflects God's revelation of His relation to history, rather than of a revelation of His very Self. Even His will or His wisdom is not completely expressed through the prophets. Prophecy is superior to human wisdom, and God's love is superior to prophecy. This spiritual hierarchy is explicitly stated by the Rabbis.

To be a Jew is to renounce allegiance to false gods; to be sensitive to God's infinite stake in every finite situation; to bear witness to His presence in the hours of His concealment; to remember that the world is unredeemed. We are born to be an answer to His question.

The Sabbath is holiness in time.

To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved to it; to be a part of civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history. Civilization is on trial. Its future will depend upon how much of the Sabbath will penetrate its spirit.

Just as the Shechinah is in exile, so is the Torah in exile.

Judaism is God's quest for man.

Thus Judaism is based upon a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation, upon the will of God and upon the understanding of Israel.

The Torah is primarily divine ways rather than divine laws.

During that long span of time, then, Jewish history would have to be written in other ways. It would become the story not of power, but of ideas and beliefs. And its most important turning points would not be the winning of wars or the building of monuments, but the writing of books.

Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God. ...all of these religions, at least in their orthodox expressions, are incompatible with science. This is as far as one gets with a purely logical analysis. Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other Gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

We may owe Superman and E.T. to Jewish film directors, but there's no doubting that it's the Christian story we're being told.)

For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes.

We know of the tensions between the first Church in Jerusalem and Churches in which Paul of Tarsus became the prominent teacher .. The Jerusalem Church remained closer to the parent Judaism than other Churches did, that secondary grouping of other Churches revered the ministry and then the memory of Paul, who suffered the potential handicap of never having met the lord in his public ministry unlike his contemporaries in the Jerusalem leadership who included relatives of the lord.

There is a tradition in Judaism that happiness and sorrow must be intermingled. On Passover, you are instructed to remove drops of wine before drinking it to lessen your pleasure. Each drop removed represents a tragedy that befell those who went before you. It's the same at weddings. The couple breaks a glass by stepping on it together. This is so they will remember past sorrows in the midst of their present joy.

But what is perhaps most curious about the English experience is the way in which a belief that they had been chosen by God could have produced a version of religion so temporizing, pliable and undogmatic. After all, orthodox Judaism, which is built upon the assertion that the Jews are the chosen people, is one of the most demanding, prescriptive religions on earth. But there is scarcely anything prescriptive about the Church of England.

This was the end of Jewish history as a separate

Two thousand years ago, God started a revolt against the religion He started. So don't ever put it past God to cause a groundswell movement against churches and Christian institutions that bear His name. If He was willing to turn Judaism upside down, don't think for a moment our institutions are safe from a divine revolt.

We owe to the Jews,' wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, 'a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.

My husband, Jim, converted to Judaism just before our wedding.